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Everything smells new. The door handle gleams and the polished wooden floor is as flawless as a fresh sheet of ice. CAST has moved from the picturesque gallery on Hunter Street and now occupies slick office space inconspicuously located behind the Hunter Island Design Centre on Tasma Street, North Hobart. Set amongst carparks and the industrial clutter of Hobart's chic cafe dragstrip, the minimalist grey block which CAST now calls home has become the solid foundation for one of Tasmania's leading art corporations.
The first official exhibition to adorn the freshly painted walls was Whispers, Lies and Text. Curated by Mary Knights and inspired by the work of Symbolist poet, Stephane Mallarme, the exhibition explored the use of text in visual art. Here, text was decontextualised and lifted from the page. It was embedded into wood and fabric, moulded with paint and manipulated through video images and slide projections. Text became an emblematic signifier of thought, experience and form.
Every work was a whisper of memory, and experience was documented by fragments of information, the residue of communication. Like the rose that haunted the Symbolists, its scent more disturbingly memorable than the outward beauty of its form, the works penetrated and developed the 'essence' of text as a method of communication and record of memory. Humanity was reduced to discarded notes and invitations in Lee Paterson 's The Golden Wall 1998 and Maria Kunda's Words of Love 1998 and a simple journey was symbolised by the chewed and broken pencils of Pavel Buchler's Six Days 1998. Rather than exhibiting text in the standard literary form of books, the word was constructed as a visual representation of jumbled thoughts and distant